A Murder for Christmas
A historical crime novel inspired by a real 1907 North Dakota murder case.
Author's Note
I first encountered the story of Arthur LeClair as a boy in Neche, North Dakota, when I found his gravestone and asked my grandmother about it. She was a local historian, and she showed me old newspaper accounts of the murder. I never forgot the case.
Years later, I returned to those fragments of local history and began imagining the people, the winter, the town, and the questions that still seemed to linger around the story.
About the book
In December 1907, a killing on the northern prairie set a small community on edge. Suspicion moved fast. Certainty moved faster.
But in a world of winter wind and ice, pioneer farm families, newspaper accusations, and courtroom pressure, the truth was harder to see — and easier to bury.
A Murder for Christmas follows the investigation, suspicion, and trial surrounding the death of Arthur LeClair, bringing to life the people caught in the machinery of justice: grieving families, meticulous lawyers, frightened witnesses, and the unlikely investigator whose work would change the case.
Set against the stark beauty and hardship of early twentieth-century North Dakota, the novel explores guilt, memory, prejudice, faith, and the dangerous comfort of believing the first story that seems to fit.